The India-Bangladesh cross-border pipeline will be inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina on 18 March
Dhaka: India will begin exporting diesel to neighbouring Bangladesh through a pipeline this month after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina inaugurate the cross-border oil pipeline on 18 March.
“Good news is India will send us diesel, the (oil) pipeline has been completed. The two premiers will inaugurate the pipeline on 18 March,” Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen said.
The India-Bangladesh cross-border pipeline will be inaugurated by the Prime Ministers of Bangladesh and India virtually.
India-Bangladesh friendship pipeline
Till now, Bangladesh used to import diesel from India through railway carriages.
The announcement of India-Bangladesh friendship pipeline (IBFPL) launch by Momen came a week after he held talks with Indian counterpart, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar on the sidelines of the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting last week in New Delhi.
India-Bangladesh oil pipeline
India would export diesel to Bangladesh through the 130-km pipeline.
The India-Bangladesh oil pipeline has been constructed at a cost of Rs 3.46 billion and has been drawn from the Indian line of credit (LoC).
The pipeline stretched 125-kilometre inside Bangladesh territory and 5-kilometre inside India.
The cross-border pipeline will carry fuel from Assam-based Numaligarh Refinery Ltd’s (NRL) marketing terminal at Siliguri in eastern Indian state of West Bengal to the Parbatipur depot of Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC).
The mechanical works of the project was completed on 12 December last year. The ground breaking ceremony for IBFPL was held in September 2018 in the presence of PM Modi and PM Hasina through video conferencing.
During his meeting with Hasina in 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had agreed to finance the cross-border pipeline with a capacity of one million metric tonne per annum (MMTPA).
For the unversed, the multi-functional modular seabed trencher independently developed by China completed the laying of more than 100 kilometers of the first ocean pipeline project in Bangladesh last year.
The project once completed will solve the problem that 100,000-ton tankers cannot dock at Chittagong Port, Bangladesh, and must rely on maritime ships to transport crude oil.
Source : FirstPost
